


Here the River Brought You

by purplekitte



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Origin Story, Gen, Nature Versus Nurture, Origin Story, Origin Story Swap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-01-25 22:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1664573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplekitte/pseuds/purplekitte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was more to it than environment influencing character. Primarchs were native of their homeworlds down to their blood and bone in ways that did not make sense when one considered that they were non-native adoptees of that world from a lab under the mountains of Terra. Yet everything fit so perfectly.</p><p>That, of course, was if you believed causes preceded effects, which just wasn’t true. Not when the Warp was involved. Not when beings that existed outside of time were involved. Everything happened because it was meant to happen, because it always happened.</p><p>a.k.a., Primarchs home-planet swap</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Roboute of the Russ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a man who thinks too much

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone's wondering about the logic about who got swapped where, there wasn't any. I left it to the random number gods of the d20 and am just running with whatever I got.

The raids of the wolves were too fast, too well organised. The men of the Russ put together their own parties into the wilderness to strike back, every trick and trap they knew, but the wolves were always a step ahead of them. Like a witch were guiding them to see as men saw and think as men thought, some said.

Then the attacks stopped and the men did not know why. They did not know the conflict within the pack.

_We’ve eaten well. It’s time to disperse. Your brothers and sisters will soon too._

_I’m not ready, Mother,_ said the blue-eyed half-grown. He spoke no words. He knew no words. He was a wolf. He had never been anything but a wolf, and did not see why he should seek out the two-legged prey.

_You could predict what they would do._

_I can hunt mammoth too, but that doesn’t give me tusks._

_You have two legs and forepaws all the wrong length, don’t be stupid,_ his sister, scent-of-ice-flowers-on-the-wind, pointed out. One of his brothers laughed until the blue-eyed wolf growled at him until he showed his belly in apology and submission.

His mother knew he would, she could smell his curiosity as well as his naked skin, though perhaps she had higher expectations of his finding a mate when he got old enough to notice pheromones than he ever took interest in. He was a wolf, not food, but, well, she did not think like a human would have, but she was not a fool.

To the men of the Russ, the wild boy was a curiosity. They did not know he was a wolf puppy, because that was impossible. He was a child, not a powerful witch, and a stupid one at that. He did not understand speech or wear clothes or know how to smelt iron or wield an axe or any usual task even a child should know, though he did break the arm of a man who thought to make him his thrall with an effortless grip of one hand.

Common sense said a feral child living any length of time on Fenris was impossible, for that matter, but whatever his past might be, the boy was here so that was that. He was too real and mundane to be a spirit, for all that he was clearly a legend in the making. Thengir, king of the Russ, took a liking to the child and taught him all the things a man needed to know. The child absorbed everything and thought about it behind steady blue eyes. Thengir called the boy Roboute and treated him as his own son.

Roboute lived among the Russ for some time and took to human ways quickly. He could fight better than any other man in the tribe full-grown, he could handle any boat and spear any creature below the surface, he knew all the sagas and the laws of the skjalds.

On a whim he desired to return to his pack and see them again. But when he returned to the wilds he realised he saw them as a human would see them, not as a wolf. He saw with opened eyes that his family were animals and he was human, for he had forgotten how to speak to them and they fled from him.

Despondent over the rejection by the mother who had nursed him, the boy sought the counsel of his human mother. Eir Thengirswif was a very wise woman; all knew this, though some men, insecure fools all, felt the need to add ‘in the way of women.’ She told her son, ‘How did you gain this power to speak to wolves? You always had it. You lost it just as easily. If you want to learn again, you will have to learn it the hard way, then it will be yours for life. It will never be the same, though. You will be a man who speaks to wolves, not a wolf.’

Roboute saw that his mother was correct. He was a man, not a wolf, and he could not go back. His mind worked in man-ways and he could hardly remember what being a wolf had been like, like a dream once woken or barely understood images from infancy.

To speak to animals was a thing of magic, a thing of women’s magic. It was wrong for a boy to study at womanly things.

The boy asked too many questions. He thought too much. He did not sport with knives or ale or wenches. He had had some popularity before from being strong, but he lost much of it as he stopped fitting in and absorbing everything he was told and started to apply what he had learned to how he thought it should be.

Why was this magic for women and this magic for men? Why were women not usually allowed in some parts of the workforce when the blacksmith’s widow was their only smith until her son was old enough to take over his father’s work, and a maiden or widow might become an honorary man if her father or jarl was lacking? Why did the young men say no one would listen to the advice of a woman, but no king sailed without consulting an oracle-priestess? He knew the stories men told when no women were around, cautionary tales of dangerous magics and the power women could have if they weren’t managed properly so they didn’t know it. He listened to the stories women told when they thought no men could hear them, those of how to manage a husband without his ever knowing he was being lead.

Fenris was constantly changing and unpredictable. But Roboute saw patterns. To be able to navigate the tides and the stars, to see when islands would rise and when they would fall before it happened, these were the most honoured of skills in any tribe, for a man or a woman. Roboute was so far beyond any skill seem outside of ancient saga it scared many. Was he a god then? And more important, what had he given up for this power, for they understood how these things worked, even for gods?

He said, we can settle here in Asaheim. We can raise strong walls. We can build. We can defeat the other tribes; I’ve watched battles and understand what leads to winning or losing. Why can’t we set down more in the sacred rune-stones than we do? It would be useful.

When Thengir, king of the Russ, died, an Althing was held to elect the next king of the tribe. Roboute would go on to lead his people to victory and prosperity, the signs were already there that it was going to happen, but there were many who left then and would never look upon him except with scorn and for war.

No proper man was that. He went against too many traditions. He was a sorcerer, an abomination that, and he listened to women too openly and men of any standing. They were the wise men who knew that innovation was dangerous. Life was too marginal already. If you screwed up, or your good idea wasn’t quite as good as you’d hope it would be, everyone would starve, they would freeze. The old knew this and the young rarely survived learning.

He won over his enemies in battle because he was stronger, smarter than them. He won against any tribe who would attack him or stand against him until they were only scraps on distant islands eking out meagre livings while his people grew fat on tribute and new inventions. None could stand against their muskets and the steam-ships, dynamite and their steel.

He learned to speak to wolves again. Yet he was not a wolf, not of the pack, not one of his litter-brothers and -sisters. He could only speak to them as a man to an animal. Those who returned with him to his halls did so only be sitting at his feet and eating scraps from his table.

By the time the Emperor came to Fenris, they had maps and schools, medicine and mills turned by the heat of deep volcanic vents. Their herds were vast and well-managed, their farms careful and plentiful, though few worked at such occupations anymore. The Althing of many once-tribes made the laws and raised the taxes, while Roboute Thengirsson signed off on them, the warrior-statesman, his blond braids simple in the modern fashion and his beard short, his coat woad blue and his red wool cloak already becoming archaic. Roboute embraced the Emperor gladly, and returned rarely to Fenris thereafter, even to the cities he had built, which rapidly advanced to the technological standard of living of the modern Imperium. There were other worlds, worlds he loved better.

Always there was treachery lurking at his back and in his home, but that would only tell later.

They said, this is a man whose home does not love him, and who throws away all that is old and should have been his for the power of these new ways. Quisling, they whispered, though of course you couldn’t say that outright because he had joined the Imperium and the Imperium were the righteous, rightful conquerors everyone should hail and conform to.

They said anyway, This is a man who makes wolves into dogs.


	2. Perturabo, Warlord of Barbarus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there is nothing that exists that I cannot tear down

The Warlord of the Highest Peak wanted a weapon. He had dark powers over life and death, wind and acid rain, but there were many other necromancers on Barbarus. He took in the child, human but not human, who burned with each drop of acid, but did not care because he would not allow pain to matter to him.

The Warlord taught Perturabo war. War in those days was made with clouds of fog and shadow and armies of the shambling dead. Perturabo was too straight-forward for the ways of mist and darkness, but that was alright too, as long as his iron heart was tempered. They would make a new type of war, not a war of status on the mountains and quick raids, but one of annihilation.

So Perturabo did as he’d been told and set about tearing each and every stronghold down. He threw shambling horrors at gates as he devised ways to leave no rock atop another and allow nothing within to escape unscathed. He sometimes wondered, as he learned how things fit together so he could bring them down, if there was something more, something lurking at the edge of his vision that he could not quite see, but there were only sharp, utilitarian angles and dense screens to keep the burning acids out. He had never seen anything else, and knew only the grey-green of the clouds, the pocket marks in the stone, the rot in the soil.

One by one, he and the Warlord brought down fortresses, higher and higher until even Perturabo could barely breathe. He was left alone to it more and more, his father taking the more interesting work of turning others’ necromancy to his own, and leaving the fixed fortifications to his weapon.

When the last of his rivals had fallen, the Warlord sent word to his son through the insects in the ground to stand down and put down the forces he had raised and wait until some other use had been found for him.

Perturabo did not stop. He hated his father too, hated him more than he’d ever hated anyone else he’d ever had opportunity to kill.

There was one last fortress still standing on Barbarus, and he would tear it down. It taunted him from the acid heights where even he could not climb, so he tore down the mountain first to bring it to him.

The stranger found him walking through the ruins, cataloguing what everything had once been that was now scattered across all the cliffs and made into fields of bone and piles of debris. The rain was falling, but he did not care. Rain fell often. It burned, but the pain was a constant background noise of existence and it was barely noticeable at this altitude.

‘What have you done here?’ the stranger asked.

‘I killed my father,’ Perturabo answered. Some part of him felt that he _should_ feel bad about this, but he did not. He had never hesitated. He had never felt anything but satisfaction. Now he didn’t feel anything at all.

‘You did not, for I am your father,’ said the Emperor of Mankind.

Perturabo saw that this was true and knelt before Him. ‘What would you have of me?’

‘Be my hammer,’ He instructed, and Perturabo nodded. That was what fathers asked of you. ‘Renounce necromancy as abomination and the xeno-breeds that once roamed here and join the future of Mankind.’

The Emperor brought him down into the valleys, the low valleys where the miasma barely reached. ‘These will be your people now.’

He’d been only vaguely aware that such beings, humans, lived down in the lower valleys. Animals, livestock, prey, he’d always heard them dismissed, so he had dismissed them too.

They in turn were afraid of him. A necromancer by his dark robes, a giant, scarred and hideous from the acids and the dark magics around him to their eyes. He did not care they feared him, it was only natural. There was nothing else, nothing he could want differently. He did not care what they thought of him. So he defined himself, with the list of all the things he did not care about.

The Emperor reassured them, and no one hearing reassurances from the Emperor can avoid believing them then no matter what their eyes said differently, but there was no great love between Perturabo and the people of Barbarus then or after he set off to command a Legion and a fleet.

Hooded and masked, scarred and ugly, the primarch of the IVth knew only that everything died.


	3. Konrad of Nuceria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things that slip through the cracks

They never caught him.

The slavers in the mountains tried, but the holes in their nets were too big, made for capturing dangerous animals to be let loose in the arenas, not for a child. Certainly not for a child like that. He was too fast, too slippery, too good at singling out anyone who left the safety of the pack and killing them, then running.

Eventually the boy came to the city. Not the city proper, with clean streets and tall houses. The shanties outside the protective walls, all rotten wood and tin roofs, built wherever the garbage was thrown out to pick through it.

The people who lived there weren’t escaped slaves. Slaves didn’t escape, no one could be allowed to think that. They were slaves no one wanted anymore, not worth keeping but not dead enough to turn into dog meat quite yet. The old, the sick, the broken. Gladiators with long ropes and what few limbs they had left twitched all the time.

They starved a lot, but they shared their food with the boy too. Called him Konrad and took him in. People helped each other out down there, only way to get by. The old ones brought along the traditions of good sociability, of fraternity from the gladiator pits. No one could control the middens even if they’d wanted to, too many people who couldn’t be intimidated into submission by anyone, because if they got halfway annoyed no power on Nuceria could stop them from trying to rip you apart on the spot and not stop until you were dead or they were.

Konrad fit in pretty well. No one minded him, even if he was dark and fey and grew too fast, even if he had nightmares or fits of someone else’s rage. Even the best people you knew would sometimes get bit by the Nails and go off and slaughter a bunch of things. That was normal. That was just how life was. They were still your brothers and sisters. Hurting people you liked just happened, even when you weren’t being goaded into it for the benefit of a crowd, nothing you could control or should be ashamed of. Fight when it was time to fight and fight well. Better than being alone. They didn’t understand Konrad’s fits, particularly when he didn’t have the Nails in his skull, but they didn’t find them distressing or unfamiliar. Plenty of people were here because they saw things or heard things that weren’t there. So what, he was one of them, of course he’d be broken to have ended up in the gutter in the first place.

Then there were high-riders. They were killed because they chose to, were cruel because it amused them, sure as they were cowardly and would never dream of getting their own hands dirty. Everyone hated them, those who didn’t envy them and try to work their way up in their households to be just like them. Everyone hated those people too, but every slave knew they snitched.

‘I’ll kill them,’ Konrad said, and his brothers and sisters laughed and said save some for them. He smiled too and said, ‘I mean it, watch me.’

It was easy to sneak in through the sewers. The walls weren’t really meant to keep anyone out, not in this day and age that gladiatorial games had replaced real war between city-states. More difficult to sneak into the houses of the high-riders with their guards and their dogs and their alarms, but not for him. It was easy for him.

He awoke the scullery boy, the lowest in the household who huddled near the vent from someone else’s fireplace after eating their crumbs, with a hand over his mouth to keep him from screaming. ‘Run,’ he told him. ‘Wake every slave who deserves to live and get them outside the house. Be quiet and disturb no one else.’

The slave boy nodded, eyes wide, and ran. Konrad made his way leisurely upstairs, until probably enough time had passed.

Then he worked from the top down, slaughtering every person who had been alive in the entire house.

It was a good game. He had fun.

He learned more later, when he returned to the shanties to brag and sleep. The escaped slaves had all been caught and executed. They were being held responsible for the massacre, though those in the city guard who knew the details personally were baffled by how the investigation wasn’t quite right. Oh well.

‘Still, it was worth it,’ his sister Enara shrugged nonchalantly. Life was cheap.

‘It’s not like we have anywhere to hide them.’ Keet shrugged too and kept playing with Konrad’s hair. He was smart when he wasn’t coughing so hard his lips turned blue. ‘Keep doing it and they won’t want to waste property.’

‘Keep doing it until they’re none of those fuckers left,’ Mitty chimed in.

‘They’ll send them back to the markets until they’re glutted. Just kill the high-riders. Someone’ll get around to lynching anyone under the stairs who deserves it while they have the chance.’

‘Can I come with you, Konrad?’ Mitty asked. ‘I want to play too.’

‘You don’t have any legs and I’m not carrying you close enough to hit anyone.’

‘Spoilsport,’ his sister stuck out her tongue at him.

Now, when a primarch decided you were going to die, there wasn’t much more to it. Night after night he hunted the high-riders of Desh’ea in their own homes, then hunted them down when they started filling their homes with guards and hiding elsewhere. At first the authorities thought it was a slave revolt, but quickly they learned it was a monster. It was a slave revolt too, eventually. Authority could not be challenged. No number of slave corpses lining the roads could stand up to the fact whoever, whatever, it was doing this was getting away with it.

When the people of Desh’ea overthrew those high-riders he hadn’t yet and killed them themselves in the street, Konrad decided it was time to travel. He didn’t go alone, though he might have if half his family hadn’t threatened to walk after him on foot if they had to even if they all died stupidly in the wilderness if he disappeared on them. He complained the entire way to the next city state about having to slow down to other people’s pace or toss Keet over one shoulder because his legs didn’t work and Arisa carrying Ria’s baby over the other.

He didn’t really mind.

Sometimes cities sent strike forces after him, sometimes armies, sometimes armies just crossed his path that one city-state had taken the opportunity to send at another. They could not catch him, so they could not kill him. No one could catch him. Sometimes they did unpleasant things to other people or threatened to do so thinking this could stop him, but he ignored them and hunted them down and killed them anyway. One by one, city by city, he slaughtered his way through the high-riders.

There were other things happening around Nuceria, though he hardly paid any attention to them. Maybe a little disappointed to have come all the way out there when a city presented the bodies of high-riders already strung from their walls before he’d even gotten there and freed all the slaves, but oh well. They’d have left something behind alive for him to drain the bloodlust on, like a gladiator when the Nails started biting, everyone knew that.

People wanted to ask him questions a lot, stupid questions. He didn’t care. He knew people who need punished when he saw it, but the finer points of law or government people kept asking him bored him. He didn’t know or care about crops or building codes. He didn’t know what to do with Nailed ex-gladiators who couldn’t possibly be reintegrated into wider society. He didn’t know about economics or infrastructure or jobs or medicine. The legend he’d set out of build had been that of a monster who punished evil, not a lawyer.

He made people like Keet do it, people good with words, found some people like Old Juniet who could read, dug up the level of middle-management where competent people actually ran day-to-day life even if they didn’t make policy and found the ones he didn’t feel like killing on the spot. Most of his friends ran off from responsibility fast, they were just slaves or street-kids, they didn’t understand how to run a world, but those who got good at handling things got more and more piled on them as fast as they could learn and organise and delegate because they could.

The people he trusted could make whatever laws they wanted about the details, as long as his laws remained paramount, as long as he could enforce his justice when he felt the urge. He killed those who got the idea they could act like high-riders now, if no one else beat him to it.

The visions weren’t so bad anymore. The buzz at the back of his mind didn’t hurt so much. There wasn’t such a press of negative emotions seeping in and squeezing at him (Maybe because people are less unhappy, you fucking moron, Ori suggested helpfully). None of it went away, but it was only the usual things and nothing worth worrying about.

On the day the strangers came from the skies, Konrad was ready. He’d known it would be today. He’d seen it.

The government men who’d come to silo outside the city where he usually could be found with a bunch of freed gladiators who couldn’t go anywhere else were surprised he already knew, though really they should have gotten used to it by now. He let the younger children braid flowers in his hair, like even slaves did in spring when the weeds were growing everywhere. The older children, the ones who’d been too young for the Nails before such things had been abolished, went to schools now.

He’d seen this day. It was worth celebrating.

His father told him there was planet after planet out there with tyrants like Nuceria had had and Konrad grinned a feral grin and said he would kill those high-riders too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doesn’t fit into the timeline of the story, but I want to go on a random aside about Konrad’s equerry Sanrio. He calls him “Keet’s kid” or just “Keet” at least as often as his name. Keet was the smart guy of the group when they were kids and is now governor of Nuceria while Konrad is busy being a giant cat, and Sanrio is one of his numerous kids from growing up to be happily married. Konrad thinks they look a lot alike. Everyone else thinks one of them is a Space Marine and the other is a skinny guy with glasses in a wheelchair with crippling polio, but they are fairly alike in personality and it makes Konrad more inclined to actually listen when Sanrio tells him he’s an idiot because he’s conditioned to occasionally listen to Keet. Keet told him to “look after Konrad, he needs it.”
> 
> Also, gotta say, the very idea of Curze with the Butcher's Nails panicked me for a couple breathless seconds there before the story I actually wrote came together in my mind.


	4. Vulkan Kurganson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’ll stand alone if I need to, forever

‘You just have to hold this pass and Chaos and its forces won’t be able to advance into the lands below.’

‘Think I can do it?’ Vulkan asked with a grin.

‘No fucking way,’ said the witch.

His family had said that too, get back behind the walls, come home to Karaz-a-Karak, don’t be a fool and wander off into the Chaos Wastes, don’t be another grudge for the book that we need to seek vengeance on. The witch said it differently. She had an amused lilt in her voice, that of one absolutely sure he was going to do it anyway.

Vulkan Kurganson was strong. Stronger than any dwarf he’d ever know (being a particularly tall dwarf aside, what did it matter if he was adopted). He had Ghal-Maraz, a most exceptional weapon, by Grabthar’s hammer; according to the witch the most powerful icon underlying the very structure of their universe.

But he could not win. The forces of Chaos were infinite and eventually he would be overwhelmed by numbers. They would drown him in corpses if need be, pin and crush him under their weight.

‘You promised to help. You said you could.’ The warhammer was light in his hand, eager to be used for this.

When she’d taken him to her bed she’d said her name was Siglinda, but it wasn’t her real name. She admitted she didn’t have one. She was the time witch, the star witch, the horse witch, the witch of the woods. She was dark--not as dark as he was, but darker than anyone else he’d ever met--and her eyes too blue-on-blue, but no one seemed to notice how foreign she was. She changed name as often as the power behind each one suited her purpose. Names were destinies on some level and she didn’t have one of her own. Because she was outside the loom of destiny, she could rework the strands of other people.

It was hard to remember her from meeting to meeting, anytime she was out of his line of sight honestly. That was probably connected.

‘I did. Yours is a great destiny, a great potential. I can change it to what you want it to be. I can collapse the quantum wave front into any particular actualization.’

‘What will that do?’ He kept smiling. The forces of Chaos out in the Wastes stretched from horizon to horizon and he had to protect his people from that. He was angry these dark forces arrayed against him existed, but it was a good anger. It burned hot and made him strong.

‘I can make this moment in time all moments in time. You, here, fighting enemy after enemy and winning. No matter if you get tired, there was a time when you weren’t tired, now, and that’s then too. No matter if you die, you won’t stay dead. As long as you stand here and never give up, they’ll never be able to get passed you. Oh, little trickles of Chaos will take other paths from time to time, but nothing like this. You’ll hold back the tides. As long as you keep fighting, as hard as you can, no matter what, forever.’

‘That’s the price then?’ These stories always had a price, a give and a take. ‘I can never leave, never go home again, never falter.’

‘Yes. The darkness is eternal, all-powerful, every changing. You want to hold the line against it, you must do it, never despairing. Forever. Each eternity a moment, each moment an eternity. You’ll pass out of this world and into legend. The god who stands at the gateway of hell and keeps the damned within.’

‘Alright,’ he said. It wasn’t much of a decision. He’d already made it. He couldn’t do otherwise and be himself. He was the mountain that protected his people in and of himself.

She was silent for a moment, then made a sound like a swallowed sob and stepped towards him. ‘You don’t want this,’ she whispered into the chainmail on his back. ‘You think you do, but that’s because you’re young and you don’t know better. You don’t know all that’s out there. You could be so much more than this, Vulkan.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘I didn’t expect to love you. I knew I might break my own heart, but I didn’t expect to want to throw all my plans away for you. Not even your father will be able to twist you back around to what he wanted from you for this, and I thought that was important to me.’

‘I knew you were going to betray me all along,’ he admitted. ‘I’m not stupid, I knew, I know stories and what women like you always do in them. I like you anyway. So do it.’

She did cry now. ‘I hate you. I hate you so much, you kind-hearted, naïve idiot. I’ll save you from this. Wait for me. Don’t give up on me, because I won’t forget about you either.’

‘Of course not. You’re my friend. Day will come again. What are you going to do?’

‘Close two doors,’ the witch said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vulkan is swapped with Sigmar from WH Fantasy, fyi, and I apologize for going off on tangents and plot points that probably only make sense in the context of other unrelated fics I've never finished or posted rather than, I don't know, actually drawing more from Time of Legends canon.


	5. Leman el'Jonson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a brother knight and a good brother

Only a fool hunted alone in the forests. A fool or a hero of myth, and few would have denied Luther was both. Follower or detractor, everyone knew Luther pushed, Luther dreamed of a world entirely unlike the one they lived in, fundamentally incompatible with it, and he would destroy all they knew, or the Order, or himself, or all of those things perhaps, or so they said.

Luther was hunting because it wasn’t enough to do what had always been done, to be preyed on and retaliate and return to the keep to congratulate themselves.

The beast he hunted was canny, with dark wings blending into dark leaves. He looked up, so it wasn’t until his warhorse started that he saw death in front of him, eyes pale as ice in the gloom.

The beast leaped, and Luther ducked, but like a knight, with a lance held before him and his chainsword at his other side should it evade spearing itself. But the beast passed over him, and he saw it fully for the first time.

It was thick-furred and brindled with grey and brown and red, perfectly camouflaged for the trees. Each beast was different from one another, and this one was canine. No, more than canine like a bloodhound or terrier, more than a feral dog, even one with the size and strength of a great beast. It was something primal, never shaped by man before, harking back to an old word from before the Old Night, _vulf_.

The crash with which it landed was accompanied by a long, avian shriek. Did beasts hunt beasts when they came upon each other? He was used to thinking of them as unlike true animals, but they hardly worked together, only killed.

When he looked it was gone, and only a carcass remained. He dismounted from his horse for better manoeuvrability for when it circled back around, and drew his pistol.

He heard a sound and turned to it, weapons at the ready, but it wasn’t the vast bulk of a beast, only the rustle of a small animal through the forest.

Not an animal, a child. A filthy child, naked but for the matted red hair to his knees. Feral... no, not feral. Wild. Luther was transfixed by those grey eyes, with absolute knowledge of what was before him, yet knowing it must be a fantasy.

The boy, for it was a boy and must have always been, approached him without wariness. Curiously, he pressed his nose against the lower corner of Luther’s breastplate and recoiled in surprise at the cold, hard metal. Then he chuckled and leaned again to feel it against his cheek.

Luther had a thousand questions, but he couldn’t have done other than bring the child back to the Order as his ward after he muttered, in words that sounded strangely accented, a Terran accent if he’d known it then, and unfamiliar in his mouth, ‘You smell good.’

*

The boy was called Leman el’Jonson, for he had come out of the forest and none knew his true father’s name, and Luther said only he had found him as an orphan.

He was strange, but charming and popular. The other young novices about his age learned quickly that he was too strong, too quick, unable to train with them seriously. But they learned to like him, for he liked to laugh and play games and pranks with them. Luther trained him himself until Leman had both the skill and the control over his strength to study with the younger knights, and by then he had their height as well.

Leman grew too fast and didn’t stop. ‘Good,’ Luther told him, though he too was uneasy with it. ‘With your power, we have a weapon that can save Caliban.’

‘I want to help you, Luther.’ He smiled easily. ‘We’re brothers.’

Luther and Leman brought home beast after beast to show-off it was possible to their comrades. He brought Leman with him to meet with other knightly orders, where he could defeat their champions and win over the favour of their men with his popularity.

He did not change his form again, even when no one but Luther would have been able to see. If ‘again’ was the right word, Luther said to himself though he didn’t believe it. There were those who called Leman a monster, for what else could be so strange and unnatural as he, but his followers were those who said perhaps beasts they needed to be to defeat beasts, and his strength was theirs. Luther said such things, keeping to himself then the secret knowledge of how very true and literal those words were.

The Great Hunt progressed as Luther had envisioned it, making the world theirs, freeing them from their keeps and castles and walled towns. They could scour the forests glade by glade until they were fit for humans. They killed beasts, cut down trees, built roads between the far-flung reaches of habitation across the world. There were those who resisted the improvement of their lives, who feared their own power over others might be lessened, but they fought them, Luther and Leman at the forefront and side by side.

It was a surprise when Leman was elected the new Grand Master of the Order by their peers. Yes, a surprise, that was the best way to put it. Maybe it shouldn’t have been, when everyone else thought it. Leman was popular, well-liked, wise, true in friendship and even quicker to forget anger as he was to feel it. He had slain more beasts, done more great deeds than any. Any. Somehow he’d always thought of Leman as someone who needed looking after, who ‘stumbled’ into secret cabal meetings loudly and made a nuisance of himself and their mysteries publically, who brought home strange people and made inappropriate friends, who wasn’t quite human. Who fought for Luther’s dream. Without him, would Luther have ever succeeded? It was more than his dream alone, it was for the world, so what mattered was that it happened, not who carried it out.

Leman el’Jonson was not one to be unobservant of people or to let things fester in the dark.

‘What troubles you, my brother?’

‘Nought but shadows on the wind,’ Luther told him, unsure himself of his own broodings, nor was it proper for a man to speak of his heart too openly, or it had been before Leman had lead the children you saw today to undisciplined rowdiness.

‘I never meant for this to happen, you know,’ he said. ‘There was something warm and bright in you when I met you, and I never intended to take it. It should have been your destiny. I’ve always known,’ he said with a vague reference to the _before_ they never spoke of, ‘what I was meant to be. To be a lord over men-at-arms, certainly, but not to be a visionary. I am a sword in the hands of my liege. My dream was never to change the world and I never would have started down this path myself; it was to carry your dream for love of you. All we have won we have won together. What is mine is yours.’

It hurt to hear such things said aloud, things he’d rather not think of. ‘You are greater than I. It is undeniable fact. It is I who should support you.’

‘Will you? My need for you is unconditional. I promise you I will never grow so corrupted by power I will forget the fate I saw. I will never claim what is yours for my own or turn from your vision and not heed your words. You are my brother, my counsel, my compass.’

‘I would never besmirch my honour by repaying your deeds with resentment. You are my lord, and we are brothers in knighthood.’

‘Only brothers in duty and honour?’ Looking back, Luther would always know the moment all jealousy was burned from his heart, for he could resent being overshadowed in deed and legend and popularity that he might feel he might have achieved, but here Leman was a better man than he could ever have been. Without reservation, Leman lowered himself to the ground before him. On his knees, Leman’s eyes were level with his. ‘Do you really think I have such pride that I wouldn’t beg for your affections?’

‘Leman.’ Like floodgates had burst, he embraced his beloved brother and shook with emotion in a cathartic wave until he felt drained of all but affection, for the first time in however long feeling light and free and as clean as following a spring rain.

Leman pressed their foreheads together, nuzzled his nose against his neck, breathed in the scent of his hair. _You smell good,_ he remembered and Leman looked as happy to be with him as he had that day. ‘I would be lost without you: I would be a beast, without aim or reason.’

Luther had never forgotten the beast. Nor that it had fought for him, beside him, become what he had needed it to be. ‘I will never fall so low that I will not love you.’

The knights of the Space Wolves were content with their lot, crusading and killing, sure of their righteousness and brotherhood, uncaring of any who said their ways were wrong or who spoke of bestial nature among them. They executed the wicked and won the stars for humanity.

To many it was unthinkable, heretical, that the primarch of the VIth should consider a mere mortal comparable to the sons of the Emperor. (Not the Emperor Himself ever, for He saw a dream like His own and a son who responded to it exactly like he had been engineered to.) Leman paid them no heed at all: he had many brothers and sons, but one above all others, one he would never treat as anything less than an equal. Never slowing down for him, but daring him to keep up. He would not cut off his own left hand to appease the foolish and the arrogant who thought they knew what was deserved.

If doom ever did fall upon Leman and Luther of Caliban, it was not because they forgot their love for each other, for that was sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note in the supplemental appendix of Inquisitor Arys Iodice’s restricted work _Imperial Saints and Miracles, Accounts and Verification, M.31-M.33_ : ‘The strangest account of this miracle I have ever come across was in the Radical work _Righteous Fury_ by Inquisitor Jacobius before his execution for association with the Black Templars. He was influenced by the Dark Calibani heresies, which in general hold that Luther was not a Living Saint imbued with the light of the Emperor when he killed the traitor Lion and avenged Leman el’Jonson, but that he had turned to the Ruinous Powers in his grief and rage and been granted great powers by them with which he could challenge a primarch. His specific addition to this was Jonson and Luther were lovers (not a novel theory but one often debated by scholars in each age) and the mingling of their breath and bodily fluids from this allowed a mingling of their souls. Normally this would be undetectable and irrelevant, but because Jonson was a primarch, far beyond normal men, this primed Luther to be able to carry the traits of one when he opened himself to the Warp. After his death, Jonson’s spirit was able to resist returning to the Golden Throne and His Divine Majesty and the predations of daemons, and attached itself to Luther to fuel him to unreachable heights because of this. I really have no further comment to add to this wildly imaginative interpretation of events.’ (I'm not saying this is true; I like to write my own apocrypha.)
> 
> Some additional fanfic about this pair: [here](http://adepta-astarte.tumblr.com/post/154350560037/summary-lion-of-olympia-meets-luther-in-leman) and [here](http://adepta-astarte.tumblr.com/post/154565422899/summary-leman-is-an-embarrassment-to-be-around)


	6. Mortarion Garza (Mordechai ben Bityah)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’ll wrestle with any gods or tyrants

‘You can’t. It would take a miracle,’ his mother always said. She believed in gods--well, one of them--but she didn’t believe in miracles one bit. She said keep your head down, hide, run. Mortarion listened to old stories of old massacres and thought, _If I’d been there, I’d have fought. I’d have done amazing things. I’d have defeated the bad guys and rescued the innocent and saved the day._

His mother said, ‘You can’t fight the Imperium. No matter how strong you are, they’ll send another army. Army after army, building ramps of their dead to reach you if they have to, just to not lose, in another Masada. You can’t fight that by force of arms. Only a miracle.’

Mortarion agreed miracles didn’t exist, and he wasn’t sure about gods either. His mother didn’t mind much. There was more to being of the people than that.

Bityah Garza was a good woman. Her dishonourable discharge from the Unification Army was well earned with the things she would not do and the things she’d done about that, and only politics had kept it from being a firing squad. She’d seen too much of the Imperial war machine to believe any one person could halt it. She had intended live out her last days quietly, until she died or had to make some last stand while younger people without creaky old augments ran when they came for them. Maccabees was in the apocrypha for a reason.

She always said it like that, when not if. They’re not purging anyone on any scale for believing in the wrong superstitions instead of the Imperial Truth yet, but they will. They always do. The Imperium was better than a lot of the pre-Unification warlords she’d fought back in the day. But in the end all governments were the same, everyone would turn on you eventually, and you couldn’t trust anyone except your own people.

Mortarion agreed, of course he did, but there had to be something you could do about it. He just didn’t know what.

He couldn’t do a damn thing about it when the cancer finally took his mother either. After they’d buried her and he’d sat shiva for seven days, he walked all the way from the Melba hive to the big starport in Perth to get off Terra. There had to be something out there, something to fight, something he could do something about.

He enlisted in the Elysian 23rd Regiment of the Imperial Army a couple Warp-jumps out after leaving his berth on a civilian merchant vessel. It was an obvious thing to do. It was what he knew. His children’s games had been playing at being a soldier, a commando, an intelligencer. He’d been able to strip a lasgun since before he’d been able to read Talmud. You had to be able to fight when everyone was against you. He was good at it, had been good at it even before his extraordinary size and abilities had become obvious.

He told his squad he was a cull from a good geno-lineage. Not distant enough to be a mutant or an ab, but maybe there had been some tampering in the clone-line, some tweaking, maybe some old ogryn blood. Lying was easy too, he’d been taught to do that, but this story he’d always figured was as close to the truth as he’d ever know. As his mother had said, it was unlikely anyone would try to track him down and finish the job if they knew whatever happened to his gestation tube hadn’t finished the job, but there was no sense in being unsafe advertising these things.

They were good times for the most part. Oh, difficult and dangerous and muddy and hungry, but that was what made life invigorating. They fought the green-skins at Altedo, the arachno-xenos at Orphelia II, the robots of Febre that would dissolve any human on sight. He was popular, friendly enough in a quiet, contained way, a bit too pious for these modern times but kept it to himself.

On Vanaheim, the order was given to bomb out the biggest hives on the planet. They’d had too much trade with the Eldar, that meant they might have weapons from them that would make ground war most costly than it was worth. The planet could always be recolonised. Except the order never got through, it got garbled along the way, then rescinded because it looked like the all-out purge wasn’t going to be necessary before anyone had managed to sort out the confusion. They could be only re-educated, only decimated by executions or sent to penal legions rather than purged.

They’d eventually found the political officer who was supposed to have transmitted the order dead by Sergeant Garza’s gun. Of the sergeant, they found no sign. Maybe he’d turned traitor to humanity, or been killed and robbed, or killed awhile ago and impersonated by rebels. But they never found him, so it was a moot point.

 _Ima was right,_ Mortarion thought in disgust. He really had no idea what to do because he couldn’t go around shooting everyone individually. That was a childish thought, not one that would work in the real world, but he didn’t know what you were supposed to do to change the fate of something as large as a planet. How did you stop a mob when it was already in motion? He hated them and hated that he’d run away from it.

He tried science, at the University of Nalanda on Dukane. There was a different atmosphere there, a good one. He’d come to the university for the philosophical debates, the discussions of morality he remembered from his childhood, though of course they did not cite religious law in this day and age. He slept for a while on some old furniture in the shed behind the biology building, then in the basement of their library where no one ever went or their lecture halls after hearing students quizzing each other on their studies too often without getting all they were saying. There were lots of places to sleep around a campus, particularly when you didn’t need much of it. He liked the arches and the fornication of the ceilings, the flying buttresses and stained glass of buildings that had once been temples to old gods and now were cathedrals of learning.

He had some money from being good at lifting heavy things. He stayed. He knew how to pretend he belonged, to make any inconsistencies in Mordechai ben Bityah’s paperwork look like someone else’s fault. He took some classes, went to a lot of seminars, found work in the labs. Everyone was so energetic, about their beliefs or their futures or getting their paper done the night before it was due. He liked what he was doing, liked the weave of biohelices and gene expression, the medicae and magos biologis, liked the idea of saving lives, _pikuach nefesh_ , liked doing something to fight the viruses, the degenerative disorders or the radiation sicknesses like had killed his mother.

He stayed for a while, but things never went right. The funding dried up, you just couldn’t do the things you used to. The military budget was the priority now. There was the scandal of the Belmont Experiments, the feral worlds that were supposed to be receiving aid being used as testing grounds for new bioweapons. They needed a properly controlled trial or imagine all the biases they’d get when generalising outside the sample. It would lower casualties among the Imperial Army troops once the best inoculations had been sorted out. They wouldn’t have had medical care anywhere normally, they were feral worlders.

Public opinion was enough that there was still trouble in being caught. Maybe move the research out to noncompliant worlds, where civilian regulation didn’t hold. No one was ever punished for anything, not really, no matter how thorough a job the anonymous whistle-blower had done putting together evidence. What would have happened anyway if there had been more public disapproval? Riots? The military being brought in to suppress the riots more like. Maybe decimate the planet as a lesson from the War Council. Were the civilians supposed to fight back against that?

Mortarion shook his head every time he caught himself thinking where he would barricade the streets. He knew he had not the resources to make it work even if he were commanding and were as good as he thought he was, not trained personnel, not weapons, and that was just in the short term against the troops on planet or in the nearby systems. Even if they would fight and they won, there would be another army, and another. Why fight urban warfare when you could skip straight to orbital bombardment? You could always rebuild. There was no shortage of anything.

In the Heif Cluster, it was said there were miracles. Mortarion had a keen interest in those.

The rabble there was disappointing. Wide eyed, frothing, cutting eight-pointed stars in their skin, mystics and con men, fanatics and madmen, the sort of people who gave religion a bad name. He thought wistfully of the intelligence discourse of the _yeshiva_ , his mother’s feminist re-interpretations of _midrash_ , the melodious chants of prayers as flowing as their cantillation marks on a page, the measured disciple of the training yards as they learned to snipe from cover compared to these cultists who would jump to stop lasbolts with their naked bodies.

There were no miracles to his liking, only daemons.

‘The gods are real,’ some people said. As if he was worried about being punished over the monstrosities he’d just bludgeoned to death.

‘That might be,’ he agreed, ‘but I want nothing to do with them and would give no worship.’

‘But they’re the gods. You can’t hold them to mere mortal standards.’

What did they think the relationship between man and god was? Had not man eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that he might know good from evil? ‘Of course I can. I’ll wrestle with any tyrant, god or man.’

It was the Primarch Fulgrim he first met, in the gardens of the An-Iolsus Craftworld, though they later agreed to mutually pretend it had been elsewhere. Mortarion had favours to repay for this and that that had lead him there, as if by chance, and he followed the precepts of the M12 theologian Saraiene on the subject of the Eldar like any right-thinking Jew.

Fulgrim knew him for a primarch, of course. ‘Are you from here?’

‘No, I only arrived yesterday, on business.’

‘That’s for the best. The Imperium can be somewhat... close-minded on some points.’

As if he had been living under a rock the last few centuries, though he had already refused to admit to anywhere he was from, so he shouldn’t snap at being condescended to. ‘I’ve had my disagreements with Imperial policy in the past,’ he said, as if it were worth mentioning but not that big a deal.

‘Don’t worry, brother. You’re a primarch. You’ll be in command of everything. You can make your own way of war.’

It will be different. Mortarion did want to believe. He wanted to believe very much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a.k.a., the one that would make fifty times more sense if I'd ever finished and posted the WIP of 'the twins' big fat Jewish childhood' that this fic is a direct AU of


	7. Sanguinius of Trujillo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they almost destroyed him

There was an Angel.

Impossibly beautiful. Perfectly in every way, no human could help but say on an atavistic level. An imagined figure of divinity through the ages that had never existed, until now. Pure and without fault.

And utterly broken.

The stark white lights on clean white tile showed everything with clinical indifference. Everything was peeled back for better viewing, skin and muscle, layer by layer for comparison. Everything had been tested, studied. What would happen if, what would grow back, again and again to understand mechanistic details of how and why. Vast, once-white wings had been speared back like an entomologist would pin a butterfly in a collection. It was not purposeful cruelty so much as complete lack of empathy that it might matter one way or another.

Only one man remained now, a new one. Alone with His thoughts, or pretending to be so for a moment, the man wondered if He would have been better. He remembered the things He had done as a scientist deep under the ground to get this far, the things done in His name so far in this war because they’d needed done, the defining of what was humanity and what was not. What would He have done with the mutant Himself? Would His need for a general have been greater? Would He have let compassion for such a creature get involved, or was that only an indulgence He allowed Himself when that choice was out of His hands and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference?

It was not silent, but busy with beeps and whirls of machines. Like heartbeats, and they were, ultimately, as surely as a dreadnought with wires replacing neurons. He could see the rush of blood inside fragile veins, the suction pulling three lungs down and up to expand and contract.

It was still alive. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. Even to the mind it felt like a thing, not a being. It wasn’t even in pain, at least not in a way it was capable of understanding. If there was a hot, black rage there, sheer endless hatred at what had been done to it and those who had done it, it was coiled somewhere deep, like lying on an old blanket, too tired to pull it around yourself. It didn’t even respond to the smell of its blood anymore, too familiar.

The man stroked the angel’s scalp, patches where there was flesh rather than naked bone and organ, and it was aware of that, in some way. It was sentimental, and a pointless waste of time when nothing about the answer would change and there were other things to do. But He was a father still.

 _I’d rather have lived,_ it said, not in words but just a hint of longing for things that had never happened, a world it had never seen, what should have been and should be but never would.

+I know. I am sorry. Sleep now, my son.+

The angel left the world as peacefully and softly as anyone ever had, not alone but intimately cared for and lowered down into sleep for the first time since it hatched. But dead was still dead.

Janos’ face fell as the Emperor of Mankind emerged, alone and shaking His head. He fell into step beside Him to teleport back to the _Bucephelus_.

‘Begin orbital bombardment. Reduce it all to ash. Ready the astropathic choir for muster orders for the VIth. They will have work.’

Because He could feel the echoes, had heard an edifice break like a glass shattered on the floor, had felt all the psychic potential escape from the physical form that had held it back. From here it was easy to follow it to a storm of hunger and formless, targetless need to kill, in frustration turned on anything, everything, everything that moved, everything that bled too near a young, unfinished Legion. It would be a mercy.

He told the other primarch, ‘Speak of this to no one, not even Roboute.’

‘Yes, Father.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lost Primarch characters and scenarios blatantly stolen from Bloody Mary's [Ripples](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6776267/1/RipplesV1) and [Lovehammer](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8993147/1/Lovehammer-GE-Primarch-Origins). I'm sorry--you influenced my first headcanons for the entire Heresy era very strongly and I love your stuff.


	8. Lion of Olympia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> to be a stone, you must forget softness

Everything on Olympia was stone, so Lion too would be stone. To be a stone, you had to forget about softness. To be a stone, you had to show nothing of what you thought or felt. To be stone, you could have no weaknesses, or you would shatter.

Lion was good at keeping his own counsel. A quiet boy, everyone agreed, but intense. Something about those green eyes of his. He should have been handsome as he grew older, but he was as distant and cold as a mountain peak and his beauty as inhuman as a force of nature.

Lion was not patient. That implied the potential of desire for something to happen. He was without desire. There was nothing to him, for it was not safe for it to be.

The man who called himself Lion’s father didn’t mind. Lion was strong and did what he was told, he wasn’t threateningly popular. He did not complete with the young men for attention and praise. He seemed utterly unaware of the smiles young women saved for him alone. He spoke to them only of war: of logistics and supply for a city under siege, the state of the maintenance of Lochos’ walls, such things as were women’s work while their men were off besieging somewhere else. He didn’t understand he was beautiful.

He gave his tutors answered quoted perfectly from the classics when questioned. They might push him to improvise, but he would find a new work to repeat, paragraph after paragraph, until he surpassed their lifetimes of study.

The only teachers he showed any genuine favour towards, and sought out more often than he was told to, were those from the monasteries, who lived outside the walls but had nothing worth taking. He was an empty man by nature and it drew him to hear that to be without attachment and passion was a worthy goal. He liked the idea of escaping from pain and the trap of the galaxy and dying a death where the soul was snuffed out like a candle, for he remembered dreams of hells dimensions he had fallen through, though he did not speak of them.

Piety was not fashionable among the upper classes, but everyone felt better to know the prayer wheels were spinning, that they could join the holy ascetics if they felt a vocation. None but peasants believed in the old folk gods in this day and age; the monastics too--they were educated men and women, who worshipped no gods or spirits but sought enlightenment for their souls. Dammekos didn’t mind as long as his weapon didn’t run off to because a hermit while he still had use for him.

And wage war he did. Lion would sit on a mountaintop overlooking a city and device how he would conquer it, then order his armies exactly how to do so. He was strong, but as he could not reasonably punch down city walls with his bare hands, this was not terribly important in his mind. What he was was brilliant. He saw a siege from beginning to end as a series of obvious, methodical steps. His resources and those of his enemies were known quantities and unchanging in a campaign except in regularly measured ways. His tactical mind could easily account for all the variables. He made war coldly, quietly, and implacably, accepting counsel from no other general and never explaining himself no matter how unorthodox or seemingly prescient the tactic. If things ever varied from his plans it was when he succeeded too fast, too easily because his opponents panicked or mobs formed within city walls to decrease their fighting efficiency or other emotionally-driven foolishness.

He did not allow the wanton orgy of destruction that usually followed the end of a siege because it was not useful to him. Much better to have intact infrastructure and tribute for Lochos. He did not see what anyone else would want, though he let his soldiers take whatever they could carry away, in wealth or women, as their personal property.

Politics he disliked and he preferred to think of himself as a sword. Let Dammekos and the nobility play their games and point him at a target. That land belonged to my grandmother’s father, my claim is better than that of my step-cousin who now holds it. Breaking that engagement was an unbearable insult. That city conquered what once belonged to my city five hundred years ago. They stabbed each other in the back and poisoned their lovers, and Lion learned that was simply how life was, that those you held closest had the most opportunity to get under your guard.

When all the world paid tribute to high Lochos, Dammekos said to him, though the tyrant had never trusted the boy and had never seen any sign the boy looked at him with any feelings towards him except the most duty-bound of filial obligation, ‘You have delivered me Olympia, my son.’

And Lion said, ‘No. You are not worthy.’ and pushed him from the walls. He wasn’t sure why he’d done that. Perhaps it had been an emotion.

He had no interest in ruling and he did not care what wars his cousins and the nobles made among themselves for the vacant throne. His obligations discharged, in his mind, he went to a monastery and, in his saffron robes, sat on a mountain, in sun or rain, being stone and meditating on nothingness.

Nonetheless, something disturbed his perfect introspection. He was tense, irritable. Mountain ascetics did not get news of the outside world, so he was among the last to know about the strange signals from the sky and the visits from another world to Olympia. Even among monks, he was a particular recluse, avoiding even the monastery more often than not, seeking his own brooding solitude rather than studying the ancient philosophical writings or teaching the children of nobility and peasants alike like most monks did or giving sermons to the community. He meditated on the most remote and inaccessible cliffs so people would stop asking him to bless them, as a holy man.

When the Emperor of Mankind found him, he said to him, ‘I am your father.’

And Lion knew immediately that this was true. Here was what had been missing, what some part of him had always waited for, the worthiness he felt lacking from Dammekos. ‘I still have work to do, then,’ he said, breaking the vows of his ordination in a moment and without a second thought, and put on shoes and let his hair grow out and traded his monk’s robes for armour again, a sword to be wielded once more, and followed his father to the stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was as surprised as anyone when Lion joined some sect of Theravada Buddhism as I went along. I’m going to assume it was always there on Olympia and Perturabo just never cared. Maybe it was originally settled by space Greeks and space Sri Lankans. It is the future in space who even knows. Otherwise: dear Lion, do not decide you want to be a necron when you grow up. No.
> 
> Additional AU meta and spoilers for backstories and Heresy plotline can be found [here](http://adepta-astarte.tumblr.com/post/86436568281/some-questions-ive-been-getting-about-the) and [here](http://adepta-astarte.tumblr.com/post/99523412421/miscellaneous-primarch-homeworld-swap-notes).


End file.
